The 2002 Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the government asks the Reserve Bank to target inflation "over the medium term" rather than over an annual target. This medium term objective shifts inflation targeting towards a "halfway-house" between inflation...

This paper examines stabilisation bias - the difference between the inferior macroeconomic outcomes attained with discretionary monetary policy relative to the ideal that could be attained with commitment policy. The paper works within the linear-quadratic framework and represents the monetary...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...

We conduct a high frequency event analysis to estimate the effects of monetary policy surprises, data surprises, and central bank verbal statements on the New Zealand-US dollar and the New Zealand-Australian dollar exchange rates. We find data surprises and monetary policy surprises have...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is regarded as one of the most transparent central banks in the world. Recent research suggests that one benefit of such transparency is that financial markets better anticipate a central bank's reaction to incoming data, and in relation, do not over-react...

This paper quantifies the impact of monetary policy shocks on asset markets in the United States and gauges the usefulness of a shadow short rate as a measure of conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks. Monetary policy surprises are found to have had a larger impact on asset...

This paper extends the `Five Area Bilateral Equilibrium Exchange Rate' (FABEER) model used in Wren-Lewis (2003) to include New Zealand and Australia. This model calculates medium term exchange rates conditional on assumptions for `sustainable' current accounts. The model suggests that the...

This paper tests the standard quadratic approximation to central bank preferences on data from Australia and New Zealand, two of the earliest explicit inflation targeting countries. The standard linear-quadratic monetary policy model assumes central bank preferences over key macroeconomic...

When nominal interest rates are near their zero lower bound (ZLB), as in many developed economies at the time of writing, it is theoretically untenable to apply the popular class of Gaussian affine term structure models (GATSMs) given their inherent material probabilities of negative interest...

With nominal interest rates near the zero lower bound (ZLB) in many major economies, it is theoretically untenable to apply Gaussian affine term structure models (GATSMs) while ignoring their inherent material probabilities of negative interest rates. I propose correcting that deficiency by...